Mining with Centos 7 / nvidia GPUs

I would say, choose the one you feel the most comfortable with. I wanted a Linux, because I think it’s easier to compile things, and make your own scripts. Also I want to have the full control of it, and for free…

After some research, you will find many tutorials with Ubuntu. I tried It, but never managed to properly install it with the nvidia drivers. The overclock settings were unreachable, whatever I tried. And I tried a lot, uninstalled/reinstalled, used the official drivers, and obviously when you read the forums, there is a lot of similar problems…

So here comes Centos 7, my favorite distro… After a few try, we managed to install it correctly for mining.

All the commands above are executed under root. Juste type ‘su’ and your root password if you are logged in with another user.

now reboot and check that all is working (and it should, we didn’t do much 🙂 )

Step 3 – Install the nvidia drivers

Download nvidia drivers from nvidia official website (http://www.nvidia.fr/Download/index.aspx), don’t use the one available through yum. People are reporting that they modify the drivers, and it could cause some feature loss, like overclocking. That was one of the main problem we had with Unbuntu. (Choose your card, OS, probably amd64 version, etc, and the download will start)

You now should have X working with the latest nvidia drivers. If you see a black screen, that’s probably ok. You can either check to plug your screen on one of the gpu card, or run the following command.

ps auxw | grep X

you should see the /usr/bin/X process running. And that’s fine. You don’t need to manage all from gnome. X thinks all is working with many screens (one per GPU), and that’s all what we need, as long as we access the system through ssh or a console. Also keep in mind that X will take resources from your cards, and you will loose some hash/s

Step 6 – Install Cuda 9

Navigate to your download folder and run the installer. We tell to override all, not install the nvidia again, and just the toolkit.

sh cuda_9.1.85_387.26_linux.run -override -silent -toolkit

Add the libraries to your system, or you won’t be able to compile the miners.

edit the ld.so.conf, and add the path to cude at the end of the file:

nano /etc/ld.so.conf

add this line: /usr/local/cuda-9.1/lib64 at the end of the file

and run

ldconfig

Step 7 – Check

From there, you can reboot just to be sure all is correctly installed and running. Once logged in, you can check that you can see all your cards: